Thursday, July 2, 2015

The CIA Officer Who Recruited His Son To Spy For Russia

Bryan Denson, author of The Spy's Son: The True Story of the Highest-Ranking CIA Officer Ever Convicted of Espionage and the Son He Trained to Spy for Russia, offers a piece about the former CIA officer, traitor and spy in the Irish Times.

In one of the most bizarre twists in America’s war on terrorism, the CIA assigned veteran operations officer Harold James “Jim” Nicholson to run a counter-terrorism branch in the heart of its Virginia headquarters. This was in 1996, more than five years before the attacks of September 11, 2001, as the Central Intelligence Agency worked around the clock to draw beads on disparate cells of Middle East terrorists - groups that would later coalesce into al-Qaeda.

By all appearances, Nicholson’s installment as chief of the Other World Terrorism branch was a clever move to pit one of the agency’s rising stars, a so-called “blue flamer”, in a tilt against terrorists. But the CIA’s installment of Nicholson as chief of the highly specialised counter-terrorism unit came under the most extraordinary of circumstances: He was secretly under investigation for espionage.

The FBI and CIA had begun to suspect Nicholson of spying for Russia in the mid-1990s. So those in charge of the joint spy catching operation engineered a plan to get him reassigned from The Farm (the agency’s covert training center, where he taught tradecraft to young spies) to his new position at CIA headquarters so they could keep an eye on him. The FBI secretly installed a tiny surveillance camera above Nicholson’s desk, bugged his home, searched his office and minivan, and tailed him night and day.

Their target and his subordinates performed authentic work to identify and defeat foreign terrorist cells. But Nicholson’s hand-picked deputy - CIA officer John Maguire, a veteran counterterrorism operative - secretly served as the eyes and ears of the covert spy catching venture. Maguire reported his boss’s every move to FBI investigators to help them take down the agency’s latest Judas.

In my new book (The Spy’s Son: The True Story of the Highest-Ranking CIA Officer Ever Convicted of Espionage and the Son he Trained to Spy for Russia), I point out in Maguire’s own words the outrageous irony of the CIA’s predicament: “We’re on the front end of the (counter-jihadist) spear, and we have a spy that’s the boss.”

4 comments:

Perhaps Johnny Walker et al can share a cell with this creep! This reminds me that I ought to revisit John Le Carre's novels, but I must at the same time remember that truth is stranger and more frightening than fiction. Your offering today reminds me of that stomach-churning reality. And to think that I was as a CT scared to death that I would inadvertently mention something classified to someone that would then send me to the brig. Damn, I was paranoid!

Your publisher sent me a copy of your book and as soon as I've read it, I'll contact your publicist and request an interview with you. I'd like to publish a long-form Q & A with you in The Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International, where I'm a contributing editor.

PaulDavisOnCrime@aol.com

Paul Davis is a writer who covers crime. He has written extensively about organized crime, street crime, sex crime, cyber crime, drug crime, white collar crime, crime fiction, crime prevention, espionage and terrorism. He is an online columnist and contributing editor to The Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International and a regular contributor to the Washington Times. His work has also appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia Daily News and other print and online publications. Paul Davis has been a student of crime since he was a 12-year-old aspiring writer growing up in South Philadelphia. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy when he was 17 in 1970 and served on the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk during the Vietnam War. He also served two years on the Navy harbor tugboat USS Saugus at the U.S. nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland. He went on to do security work as a Defense Department civilian employee and then became a freelance writer. You can read Paul Davis' Crime Beat columns, crime fiction and magazine and newspaper pieces on this website. You can also read his full bio by clicking on the above photo.